A Portrait of the City

Abstract

By 1922, the utopian rhetoric of the planning movement in Dublin had become a routine element in official responses to the persistent problem of urban poverty, and its impact on the city’s reputation as a European capital. The Civic Survey of Dublin carried out in that year reflects the sweeping ambition and millennial optimism about the eradication of the sprawling, impoverished neighborhoods of the city center that large-scale suburbanization promised. It would change housing policy, the Survey claimed, ‘from a hopeless study into a wonderful science. It is comparable to the glowing dawn after a threatening twilight — a step towards the social millennium’ (O’Rourke 58). This social ambition, and near-willful blindness to the complexity of the problem of poverty in Dublin, provides the backdrop for Stephen Dedalus’s immersing himself in those parts of the city most incommensurate with the vision of Dublin’s future that the Civic Survey wishes to present. His intellectual development becomes increasingly intertwined with the city’s most impoverished streets, which provide a counterpoint to the narrative of putative national pride and enduring subjection that the main thoroughfares and their monuments represent for Stephen.